A Trip to the Moon (1902)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

# 100. A Trip to the Moon (1902)

 

“Motion and emotion. They were, and are, at the core of cinema. And it was Georges Méliès who provided the final key: magic. He saw moving pictures as a way to enrich and enlarge his stage presentations.”

n Martin Scorsese

 

One of the joys of cinema is the ability to repeatedly rediscover its magic. The first films I remember seeing in theaters were the remake of “Lost Horizon” (1972) and the oddly-late sequel “International Velvet” (1978); at that point I was so young, impressionable, and corruptible, I was mesmerized by the experience and loved them both. After growing up, and learning a little about the difference between “good” and merely “big,” I viewed both again, I saw them for the piffle they really were. Still, during that growing, I had the opportunity to be transcended again and again by encountering other works, both big and small, that proved to be bold, beautiful, and compelling in ways greater that the newness of the experience I got swept-up in when I was only knee-high to a grasshopper.

 

As cinema passed it 100^th birthday (the centennial year is often given as 2015, even dates earlier than 1988 would do), many realized that the new could often be found by looking backwards. Our era of cinema is bleakly redundant, but maybe that’s always been true, as imitation is often the driving force of any entertainment, and even more so when the entertainment was expensive to produce. As each era primarily intimates its own era, looking backwards brings us many things old things new to us as we become tired of the now.

 

Looking at the earliest works of cinema, like any period of cinema following, there is more that is poor than rich, but the earliest films have the special advantage of being full of the energy created when every person engaged in this brand-new art-form was a bold pioneer, an explorer, and adventurer, and every frame, no matter how mundane, was a first or near-first. Even before the close of the 19^th c, many had experimented animation, color, sound, wide-screen, even 3D films, but with the exception of animation, none of those innovations penetrated the growing market until generations longer.

 

Better still, not all of it is mundane -- there are masterpieces there, films a near-to or more-than a century old that display a preternatural understanding of the langue of the new media in ways that allow them to, even now, speak to us with amazing directness; there is no need to make for allowances for their “quaintness.” “Nosferatu” (1922) remains one of the Horror films ever made. “The General” (1926) is a superior Action/Comedy than anything you’ll see today. “Metropolis” (1927) remains a toweringly bold piece of SF.

 

And then the was Georges Méliès, who came before all of the above listed, and even he wasn’t the absolute first either.

 

A son of a well-to-do shoe maker, he escaped life in the factory by selling off his share in the business to his brothers and drawing off from his wife’s dowry to purchase the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in 1888, originally founded by the French Magician, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who had been somewhat of an idol of Méliès as well as the famous USA Magician Harry Houdini, who borrowed Houdin’s name for the stage.

 

The 1888 year provides a nice correlation, as it was also the year of the release of what is now the world’s oldest surviving motion picture, “Roundhay Garden Scene,” from Méliès’ fellow Frenchman Louis Le Prince, which clocks in at a mere 2.11 seconds in length.

 

With the purchase, Méliès inherited the skilled staff, one of whom was Actress Jehanne D'Alcy, who soon became Méliès’ mistress and later his second wife.

 

Méliès not only ran his theatre, but proved a master Magician himself, and became quite popular as he started integrating melodramatic story-telling into his magic acts.

 

On the cinema front, the earliest films were not narrative, being too short for any story-telling. Movies pictures were conceived and composed like still photos enlivened by miraculous motion, and those experimenting in the new art form didn’t view themselves as artists yet, but inventors, trying to perfect and push the boundaries of a new technology, like the struggle to make electric power efficient (electricity was so new when “A Trip to the Moon” was made and Méliès didn’t employ it, even the interior scenes relied on natural sunlight). In 1895, two other Frenchmen, the Lumière brothers, released ten short films that together clocked in at a mere 7.4 minutes, but still constituted an extraordinary landmark moment in the history of cinema. Lumières’ camera was by far the most sophisticated ever built, their simple slice-of-life images were more deftly composed than what came before, and they charged admission and drew enormous crowds. Méliès was among the first-year audiences, immediately entranced, and attempted to purchase the Lumières’ camera and projector, but was rebuffed.

 

Though the Lumières possessed what was then the world’s best cinema technology, they were not the only people in this struggle to perfect the new invention. Méliès found his projector in England, built by Robert W. Paul, who was already experimenting with infusing narrative into his motion pictures, so a man with ambitions similar to Méliès. The first films Méliès showed at his theatre were created by yet another inventor/innovator, Thomas Alva Edison from the USA.

 

Méliès would rebuild the projector so it also worked as a camera and created his own film stock, because no such film was yet available in Paris, and further built his own processing facilities from scratch. He built the first studio devoted specifically to motion picture production in his garden in Montreuil. Called Star Pictures, it had glass walls because of his dependance on sunlight. He also was first filmmaker to use production sketches and storyboards. He eventually became to utilize arc lighting during filming. Very hands on, he helped paint his sets and build his props.

 

As he was in direct competition with the Lumière brothers (who were drawing in 2,000 daily customers to their Grand Café), the earliest films produced by Méliès were copies of their work. He soon diversified. Méliès foremost contribution to cinema was as a FX pioneer, and though his first effect did pre-date his own cinema, he had to discover it on his own. Trying to learn how to use the camera he built, there were a series of accidents with the film jamming in the middle of a take and (to quote the man himself), "a Madeleine-Bastille bus changed into a hearse and women changed into men. The substitution trick, called the stop trick, had been discovered." Méliès’ deliberate application of this accident quickly demonstrated that his use of it was light-years ahead of anyone else at the time. Soon he was using many other FX techniques like double exposure, split screen, dissolve, superimposition, reverse shots, etc, and some of these were entirely his own invention.

 

The first narrative films were generally only two or three minutes long, so really, they were more sight-gags than stories. Méliès made many of these: “The Lady Vanishes” (1896), clocking in at 75 seconds, was his first film to utilized the stop trick to recreate a popular stage-Magician’s trick by other means. It was also employed in “Le Manoir du diable” (“The House of the Devil” or “The Haunted Castle” (also 1896)) which clocked in at 3 minutes, and is generally considered the first Supernatural Horror film even though it was meant to be funny, not scary. (Both of these films starred D'Alcy.) Méliès would call these films “scènes composes” or "artificially arranged scenes" and advertised them as "these fantastic and artistic films reproduce stage scenes and create a new genre entirely different from the ordinary cinematographic views of real people and real streets," to distinguish them from work more similar to the Lumières brothers.

 

His catalog was vast, 500 films in 16 years, though the very longest was only 40 minutes. He had great success with historical reconstructions, but got into trouble with the Police for his controversial “The Dreyfus Affair” (1899), clocking in at 13 minutes, but when intended not as one film, but an 11-episode serial: It dealt with a Real-World scandal in which a Jewish Army Officer was scape-goat by his Government in an Espionage case. The film was made as the scandal unfolded, and though Méliès claimed a journalistic objectivity, he clearly sided with the pro-Dreyfuss camp. He took the narrative into the future beyond 1899 and showed the wrongs committed against Dreyfuss continuing indefinitely. Fights broke out in the theater, and the film was pulled from distribution, the first recorded incident of official censorship in cinema history.

 

In another instance, to keep one-step ahead of the competition, he filmed “The Coronation of Edward VII” (1902), clocking in at 3 minutes, before the actual event took place. When the real Coronation was delayed, the film landed-out premiering before the event.

 

Director D.W.Griffith is often credited for creating the close-up shot (in “The Lonedale Operator” (1911), clocking in at 17 minutes, but Méliès got there earlier with “The Man with the Rubber Head” (1901), clocking in at 3 minutes, though Méliès use of it was not for dramatic emphasis, but to create the illusion of gigantism. That film also featured a pseudo-tracking-shot of Méliès’ own invention, as it was too hard to move the bulky camera, he moved the actor (Méliès himself) towards the camera on a platform with wheels, this created the illusion of a motionless head suddenly growing out of proportion.

 

Méliès produced documentaries, dramas, “féeries” (or “fairy stories,” for which he would become best known during his hey-day), blasphemous religious satires, and even stag films starring Jeanne d'Alcy in a flesh-colored leotard to create the illusion of nudity.

 

Méliès masterpiece would appear in 1902.

 

“Trip to the Moon” was a stunning 14-minutes-long, Méliès’ longest up-to-that-point, maybe the most complex narrative then-attempted, and was the greatest special effects extravaganza of its day. It has come to be hailed the first SF film even made (though that may not be 100% accurate), one of the greatest works of cinema ever created, and earned Méliès the accolade of the first film Director truly worthy of the title.

 

Though the compositions are mostly flat and designed so the eye reads them from left-to-right (it was still a few years before narrative film realized it need not be presented like a stage play, with only a single, unmoving, POV), all characters and objects kept at a middle-distance, and hardly any editing applied except for the FX, “Trip to the Moon” still achieved an epic grandeur.

 

Borrowing somewhat shamelessly from the Jules Verbe’s two novels “From the Earth to the Moon” (first published 1863) and its sequel “Around the Moon” (1869), as well H.G. Wells’ novel, “First Men in the Moon” (1901), it tells the tale of Professor Barbenfouillis (Méliès), of the Vernian Congress of the Astronomic Club, who fires a manned-Space Capsule towards the Moon a huge cannon, and then his adventures there with his fellow scientists and a line of Chorus Girls they brought along for entertainment purposes.

 

Landing on the Moon, they are captured by Alien Selenites and taken underground to be presented to their King. The Earthlings escape, fly back home, and crash into a fantastical ocean which they dutifully explore. Finally, returning to Paris, there’s a statue is erected in their honor.

 

The most famous image is the human face given to the Moon (again Méliès) and his memorably unhappy expression when the landing Space-Capsule pokes him in the eye. That image, where in Méliès momentarily broke with the main conceptual limitation of the cinema of his day, is now iconic, endlessly referenced in other movies, music videos, and popular T-shirt designs.

 

Though the compositions were flat, the framing was delightfully chaotic, and all compositions were a riot of detail. The Moonscapes are fantastical but would be taken as realistic for decades to come (you can see them echoed in the painting of the legendary Space Artist Chesley Bonestell into the early-1950s). The Senlenites were cinema’s first Aliens and far more convincingly so than anything we’d see in cinema again until the mid-1950s (the costumes were the single most expensive part of the production). In the background of a scene that unfolded in Paris, one can see smoke rising from the chimneys in the matt painting. Oddly, our brave Astronauts thought it was necessary to bring their umbrellas to the Moon, and even more oddly, they prove very useful.

 

As Matthew Lucas observed, “[W]hat makes it so endearing even today is its almost naive earnestness. Méliès wanted to wow his audiences, to show them something they had never seen before … You can feel his enthusiasm radiating from the screen, like a child who has discovered a new favorite toy.”

This, one of 23 films Méliès made that same year, was by far the most ambitious. It was four months’ work and cost 10,000 francs to produce (it’s hard to calculate inflation when going back that far, but let’s say $300,000 USD in 2022). The cast was impressively large, the dancing girls on the capsule came from the Theatre du Chatelet, and acrobats from the celebrated Folies-Bergere played the rowdy moon people.

 

It was even a color-film, sort of. Approximately sixty of the prints were laboriously hand-painted frame by frame. Several craftsmen, each assigned a specific color, did this work assembly-line fashion. (One of these color prints was rediscovered in a film vault in 1993.) He also wrote a script for a narrator, sound effect cues, and an original score, to accompany the film’s screenings with live performers.

 

“A Trip …” was an international hit, which led to piracy (notably by Edison), denying Méliès all but a fraction of the film’s true profits. Méliès reacted by establishing a trade union, Chambre Syndicale des Editeurs Cinématographiques, and opening a USA office of Star Films which publicly pronounced, "In opening a factory and office in New York we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice, we will act!" These steps to protect his film rights were yet another first.

 

Though “A Trip to the Moon” was an international block-buster, and several more films were equally successful, completion with larger, better-funded studios increased over-time, and Méliès eventually got crowded out. In 1910 he got involved in a disastrous business deal with Charles Pathé -- Méliès got money to produce films, while Pathé got distribution rights, the power to re-edit his films, and held the deeds to both Méliès' home and Star Pictures. In 1913, after his distribution deal with Pathé soured, Méliès was forced into bankruptcy, and Pathé seized Star Pictures. In 1917, during WWII, the French military occupied Méliès' offices in Théâtre Robert-Houdin and melted down many of his films to gather the traces of silver from the stock to make heels for Combat boots. Still more of his prints were destroyed in 1923, when Théâtre Robert-Houdin was demolished. Finally, in 1927, during a fit of rage, Méliès, himself, destroyed all his negatives.

 

By 1927, Méliès had slipped into poverty and obscurity, forced into eke-out a marginal living selling children’s toys from railway-kiosk.

 

This must have been his darkest days, but the dawn was soon-to-come, because it proved that more of his prints survived than expected, leading him to be rediscovered before his death. A celebration of his life’s work was screened in 1929 (at this point, “A Trip to the Moon” had been languishing unshown for several years, and no complete prints were available. No complete print of the movie (B&W version) was known to exist until 1997). He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 1931 and given a rent-free apartment by a film society. He died in 1937 at age 76, D'Alcy still at his side.

 

Though maybe 300 of his films are now lost forever (including his personal favorite, “Humanity Through the Ages” (1908)), a serious-mind historical drama), about 200 were saved, and most of these are now available on DVD, though the quality of the prints is highly variable. Across the next century he was praised exuberantly: D.W. Griffith claimed: “I owe him everything.” Charlie Chaplin called him an “alchemist of light.” Terry Gilliam has called Méliès “the first great film magician.”

 

He story has been repeatedly told in Documentaries and Biopics and, perhaps appropriately, the most beloved of these Biopics weave in Fantasy elements in the somewhat-non-fiction story-telling: Georges Franju’s short-film “Le grand Méliès” (1953) and Martin Scorsese’s multiple Oscar-winning “Hugo” (2011), which was based on Brian Selznick’s novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (2007).

 

Full movie:

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) - Georges Méliès - (HQ) - Music by David Short - Billi Brass Quintet - YouTube